In the Spirit of ’68

The 1960s were a victorious decade for francophones in New Brunswick, who witnessed the election of the first Acadian premier and the opening of a French-language university. But in 1968, students took to the streets of Moncton, demanding further concessions.

What provoked these students to spark a cultural revolution on par with those overtaking English Canada and Quebec? Were they simply heirs to a long line of nationalists seeking more rights for francophones, as older histories suggest, or were they leftists whose demands echoed the ideas of student movements in Quebec, English Canada, the United States, and France?

Belliveau argues that the student movement emerged in the late 1950s as an expression of the province’s changing youth culture but then evolved as students drew inspiration from the ideas of the New Left, shifting allegiance from liberalism to radical communitarianism and ultimately fuelling the fires of a new brand of Acadian nationalism in the 1970s.